Museums Can Change—Will They?

Our great art institutions are cheating us of our artistic patrimony every day, and if they wanted to, they could stop.

I tell my students, and only somewhat flippantly, that arts policy is the most important policy arena. Seriously? Well, most people think health policy is right up there—but why live longer if life isn’t worth living? And if you don’t think government has a lot to do with whether and how you can engage with art, you just don’t understand the situation.

Think about a world in which our great paintings and sculpture are mostly on view instead of where they actually are, which is mostly locked up in the basements and warehouses of a handful of our largest museums. In which you didn’t have to go to one of a half-dozen big cities to see them, and didn’t rush through an enormous museum for a whole day because you paid so much to get in. In which you weren’t constantly afraid that you aren’t entitled to what you see, or competent to engage with it. That world is actually within reach, and the main reason we don’t have it is that the people to whom we have entrusted our visual arts patrimony have nailed each other’s feet to the floor so they can’t move toward it, and done so with the tacit approval and even collaboration of government.

Big museums have long refused to recognize their unexhibited collections of duplicates and minor works as a financial resource. As a consequence, they are wasting value by keeping these works hidden. If they were redistributed to smaller institutions, and even to private collectors and businesses, they would fund an explosion of the value for which we have museums in the first place: people looking at art and getting more out of it when they do.

The story will wind its way through accounting rules, professional ethics, and tax policy, but we can start right in a museum. This is such a conventional ritual that it requires conscious effort to realize how many things about it could be different, and maybe should be. Let’s do a field trip and look around!

A Museum Field Trip

We arrive during regular business hours or on a weekend, as the museum is open evenings only once a week. The building looks a lot like a temple, and is probably situated like one, in a park or up on a hill. We walk in past a wall of names that no one is looking at. Famous artists? No—donors. Every name on this wall records a financial transaction—but what exactly was sold in those deals? Strangely, though anywhere from a third to 90 percent of the millions of dollars acknowledged here is actually tax money, not private funds, the government and the taxpayers aren’t listed.

Usually there’s no less museum for anyone else if we go in, but this visit is going to cost some serious coin (though we didn’t pay anything when we visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington). The posted tariff offers the same thing at different prices to different people, as well as quantity-discounted admission with a newsletter subscription. This is called a “membership,” though it doesn’t entitle us to vote on anything.

We take a floor plan and perhaps an audio guide, and plunge into a maze of galleries without windows or clocks, an environment as disorienting as a Las Vegas casino. Of course, the galleries are full of art….Well, not actually full, as the paintings are spaced across the walls rather loosely. Through the rooms people (mostly women) come and go, talking occasionally in hushed tones of Michelangelo, and texting. Visitors look at each work for about six seconds, bobbing in and out to read tiny labels with an almost random selection of information. Some galleries have explanatory panels introducing the ensemble on view, with text that may be historical or biographical, may be in art-criticalese jargon or at the most elementary, introductory level, but is always laudatory and enthusiastic about the work on view: Everything here is absolutely superb.

The art is sorted by place, medium, and date of origin. At about 1900, we experience either relief or anxiety on realizing that decoding symbols (is St. Jerome the one with the lion, or the arrows?) is no longer useful, and we start to see things and images that don’t seem to be about—or of—anything, and that we would never realize are art if they weren’t in a museum. We might chat among ourselves about the art, but our engagement is quite one-way. At a concert we can at least applaud; at a restaurant we actually eat the food; at a gallery the art is for sale; and at the science museum we can touch and pick things up.

We’ve been on our feet for three hours now, though we did occasionally find a bench. Let’s go sit down and have lunch! The restaurant menu radiates educated upper-middle class: We can get a latte, but not a hot dog. What’s that—you’re tired and maxed out? We could leave and come back tomorrow, but then we’d have to pay another admission charge. So we keep going and try to see it all.

On the way out is a store selling an immense variety of things, of which not one would qualify for display in the museum, though all have something to do with art. Lots of books, and lots of tchotchkes. Art supplies, with which we could make something ourselves, are always in the children’s section.

Not everything of interest is obvious here, especially what we can’t see. We didn’t see art being made, or learn anything about how that happens. (What’s silverpoint, again? Giclée?) We didn’t see the wheels of the art world turning (dealers, auctions, collectors, artists, and critics); indeed, one would infer from a museum that what we are looking at has nothing to do with either the business of art or the process of making it. For every object on view, another 20 are in storage; almost none will ever be displayed. And, perhaps most important, we didn’t see the 80 percent of the population who didn’t go to an art museum at all in the last year.

What Are Museums For?

An art museum is a business, often a big one, but a special kind. In the United States, almost all of them are tax-exempt, educational nonprofits, with unique privileges given in return for certain kinds of social value; in other countries, they are typically government agencies, though this difference in legal form has minimal effect on their behavior. In both cases, they get to spend tax money. Either public money is appropriated directly, or, in the American system, contributions to museums are tax-deductible, and each gift carries a public subsidy. Furthermore, museums are typically exempt from state and local taxes, even though they receive the usual services of the fire and police departments, sidewalks, and the like.

They are also charged to care for the physical art objects that embody civilization and culture. Of course, science, literature, political institutions, religions, and performing arts are cultural storehouses too, but the plastic arts are unique in being at risk of loss by physical destruction. Losing the autograph score of Bach’s Mass in B minor would be a pity, but there are lots of copies adequate to perform it from; the loss of the Athena Parthenos was forever.

To think about how art museums could do their job better, we need a better idea of what that job is beyond just “owning art and showing some of it.” In his 1979 book, The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics, journalist Karl Meyer could write, “Since the turn of the century, museum professionals themselves have been trying to define the nature of the art museum,” and things have not been much clarified since. Museum mission statements are all over the map. The most common words (after art) in a 2011 survey of mission statements were: collect, museum, program, exhibit, cultural, educate, public, artist, and (oddly) words. The verbs here describe the behaviors of the museum, not the visitors (educate/exhibit, but not learn/see). With a very few interesting exceptions—of which my favorite is the Detroit Institute of Arts’ deliciously terse “Creating experiences that help each visitor find personal meaning in art”—these statements describe what museums undertake to do, but say almost nothing about what they expect to accomplish for their audiences. There is a lot of attention to making art accessible but little about art actually being accessed, or what happens to visitors who seize those opportunities.

What about visual cues? Well, reviewing the home and “about” pages of major American museums, I found only three showing anything other than art from the collection or the building from the outside. Detroit’s “about” illustration is distinctive and notable: It has young people looking at one of the Rivera murals (which we see only in a sidelong, partial view), guided by a docent who is not just talking but using her whole body. It is a picture of engagement with art, not just having art. In contrast are the Met’s aerial shot of people milling about in an enormous lobby, which could have been taken in Grand Central Station, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s picture of staff and the back of a large canvas.

I think the extremely abstract and passive presence of the museum’s public in these statements is an important and symptomatic failing, and I propose a different assignment: The purpose of an art museum is more, better engagement with art. Anything a museum does that can’t be connected back to this goal is peripheral and incidental.

Of course, this short version hides multiple dimensions of performance. “More” can entail more people looking at the art, looking at it for longer times, and looking at more, as well as more kinds of, art. Recently, museums have realized that “more” should also mean more kinds of people, especially across ethnic and social class categories. Half of people with graduate degrees went to art museums last year, but only 10 percent of high school graduates; 24 percent of whites went, but only 12 percent of blacks. And museums properly think about people in a very long future, most not yet born, and almost neurotically protect their collections for those future viewers from fire, flood, umbrellas, humidity changes, and finger oil.

“Better” is the more interesting part of my recipe. Perception, science has shown, is an active process. The only art engagement that matters is created inside the head of a viewer who combines a visual (in this case) stimulus from an artist’s work with a whole library of prior experiences and knowledge, ideas (not always art ideas) that “come to mind” (not always the conscious mind) when she confronts something presented as art. Better engagement results from presentation and installation, including mundane matters like lighting, air conditioning, and whether you can actually get to the work through a crowd. It also results from managing the library of experience that you open up and “see” the work with, including how today’s engagement with a painting (and its explanatory label, and its neighbors on the wall) enriches your engagement with an upcoming lifetime of art experiences.

Better engagement is what justifies the research function as well. People have a different experience of a work when they know who made it, whom he or she studied with, who commissioned and owned it, and how an engraving gets on paper. Better engagement puts the museum in the business of making a more competent and more demanding arts public. (Because this process is lifelong, it can’t merely be delegated to the schools, though the current savaging of arts education in K-12 schools is a tragedy, and a blunder, that we have to leave for another discussion.)

My simple goal statement already entails a variety of ways to make a better museum, and forces attention to ruthless trade-offs. For example, it may be easier to get a lot of people to come to the museum to see work that professional judgment thinks ephemeral or even schlocky, or for a bunch of wrong reasons (pornographic edginess, or high auction prices), but they can’t have a better experience if they don’t come at all. Works on paper have a finite lifetime of exposure to light, so every minute they are displayed is a minute they are denied to future generations. No simple formula can be confidently applied to optimize a museum’s discharge of its responsibilities, but steering by the “more, better engagement” star is useful.

Museums may have economic development benefits, attracting Richard Florida’s creative class, and they have served economic elites as indicators of status and distinction for generations. They are certainly good for curators’ children’s orthodontia, and a museum retrospective directs a Niagara of money into the pockets of an artist and her dealer. But all these are incidental and, as we will see, sometimes at odds with the point of a museum. The ball to keep our eye on, again, is arts engagement.

What Should We Want More Of?

How could museums do more and better? Well, for “more,” they could show more of the art they have. Any top-rank museum exhibits no more than a twentieth of its collection, often much less. There is some rotation in and out of storage but, as a rule of thumb, consider the least distinguished object in a gallery, and you can be sure that there are one or two just a teeny bit inferior, and a dozen nearly as good, in a warehouse or the basement. The Met, for example, shows 27 of its 41 Monets, but only three out of its 13 Eugène Boudins. When it comes to engravings and drawings, the ratios fall dramatically: For example, none of the Met’s 134 etchings, and only two of its 23 drawings, by Fragonard are on display. If it really damages the experience of a painting to see it any closer to its neighbor (recent museum practice has been to greatly increase the spacing between works, and never “sky” them one above the other), more art for the public would mean building more galleries and expanding museum buildings.

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